Last November, while planning this issue of the World, we put out a
call on the World website and via e-mail lists read by UU ministers,
activists, and others for essays on race and related topics, including
the UUA antiracism program. The six pieces that follow were all submitted,
if not written, in response to our call. While hardly exhaustive, they
represent a range of Unitarian Universalist views. We also asked artists
to submit their interpretations of the struggle against racism.

The Racism Embedded in Our SystemBy Joshua M. Pawelek

I started volunteering as an antiracism organizer in UU congregations
in August 1997, after attending a three-and-a-half day antiracism analysis
and team-building workshop led by Crossroads Ministries of Chicago, the
primary consultant to the UUA’s national antiracism initiative, the Journey
toward Wholeness. Crossroads, an interfaith antiracist collective, helps
religious denominations (beginning usually and sensibly with denominational
leaders) transform themselves into antiracist, multicultural institutions.

Before the workshop I knew very little about antiracism transformation
teams and certainly had no plans to join one. I’d been invited to the workshop
not as a prospective team member but as a UUA staff member. But by the
end of the workshop, I couldn’t imagine not joining the team. The workshop
had transformed me.

How was I transformed? First, I began to understand some of the institutional
obstacles that keep liberal religious people like me from becoming effective
agents of justice in the post-civil-rights era. Second, I learned to see
the world with an antiracist vision that helped me think strategically
about how to overcome these obstacles. All in all, I felt empowered. I
left the workshop believing I could and should work for antiracist change
in my own institutions.

People who know me well inform me that I’m politically naive. I sure
felt naive a few months into my volunteering with the Mass Bay District’s
Antiracism Transformation Team when I began to hear that the Crossroads
workshops were coming under heavy criticism from a variety of UU sources.
At the joint Meadville/Lombard-Starr King Consultation on Race and Theology
in January 1998, I heard white ministers claiming that Crossroads was dogmatic,
that its approach to fighting racism was essentially creeping Calvinism.
Back in Boston I heard people say that Crossroads’ focus on white privilege—how
racism benefits white people—was too heavy-handed, that it made people
feel bad about themselves and therefore wasn’t a good workshop for UUs.
I also heard questions about why we need to always focus on race: “Isn’t
class the root of the problem?” Well, I hadn’t thought any of these questions
through. Had I just unthinkingly accepted a dogma?
I went back to the notes I had taken during my Crossroads workshop.
The workshop consists of a variety of exercises in which participants grapple—intellectually
and emotionally—with a set of propositions. One proposition states that
all white people in the United States participate in and benefit from systemic
white racism, whether or not we recognize it. Another states that all people
of color internalize racist oppression, whether or not they recognize it.

These propositions did sound potentially dogmatic, not to mention alienating.
After all, in the UU congregation where I was raised, I’d learned I couldn’t
be a racist, that racism was something the KKK did, not something I was
connected to. In fact, being nonracist was a major part of the way I saw
myself—until the Crossroads workshop showed me a different perspective.
In the workshop context, the two propositions I mentioned above don’t pretend
to imply that all white people secretly harbor racist intentions or that
all people of color are helpless victims. Rather, they refer to the racism
embedded in the system we live in, a system that, on the whole, offers
social, economic, and cultural advantages to white people and disadvantages
to people of color. You might say we find ourselves in a racist social
situation. For example, my wife and I recently needed to move on short
notice. A potential landlord told us he only rented to “good” people. We
took his apartment without giving this declaration much thought. It was
the only apartment we could find that was convenient to both our jobs.
Only later, after seeing that everyone in our complex was white, did we
realize that his term “good” was code for “white.” All we had done was
rent an apartment, and yet we’d helped perpetuate racism.

From this perspective, I don’t mind exploring the term “racist” in relation
to myself. In fact, I find it helpful. It keeps me focused on what I as
a white person must strive to change. Claiming my racism doesn’t mean that
I’ve come to believe I’m inherently bad. Recognizing my unintentional complicity
in a racist system has nothing to do with my inherent worth and dignity
as a white person. There’s no creeping Calvinism here. This is not about
who I am; it’s about how I’ve been shaped—how we’ve all been shaped—by
a system we didn’t create. It is also about what I choose to do. That is,
now that I understand how I benefit from racism, I don’t wallow in white
guilt and self-loathing, but instead I choose to struggle against racism,
first by changing the institutions where I have the power to bring change.
One such institution is my church. Therefore I will work for antiracist
change in my church and my beloved UUA.

I commend Crossroads for challenging Unitarian Universalists to look
at the depths of racism in our congregations. Examples include the ongoing
difficulties we as a movement have in finding secure settlements for some
ministers of color; our unexamined European American cultural norms; the
way we often try to hide those cultural norms by appropriating the traditions
of people of color; the way we tell our own history, often leaving out
our forebears’ relationship to the extermination of Native Americans in
New England or to the slave trade; and the way we often expect the few
people of color among us to speak on behalf of “their people.”

When we can accept the overwhelming, crushing power racism has over
all of our lives, when we can grasp just how deep our inability to form
relationships across lines of race results from the racism in our midst,
then and only then can we begin to know our personal and communal responsibility
in relation to the problem, and then and only then can we begin to act,
not with long-distance, Band-Aid responses but with transgressive, transformative
solutions.

Let’s stop resisting the change that must happen. If you reject my analysis
because it’s calling you to change in ways that don’t feel good, I implore
you please to stay with it. Racism doesn’t feel good, either. So don’t
panic. Don’t run away. Take a breath. Check your step. And notice that
you’re on the journey.

The Rev. Joshua M. Pawelek is minister of the UU Church of Norwich,
Connecticut, and a program associate in the UUA’s Faith in Action Department.

My RacializationBy Richard Trudeau

I’m white. In 1950, as I was about to enter kindergarten, my mother
said, “There may be Negro children at school. Other children may call them
‘niggers.’ Don’t ever say that. It hurts people’s feelings!”

I was puzzled. Why would some children want to hurt other children’s
feelings?

“Because,” my mother explained, “some people don’t think Negroes are
as good as other people.”

Thus I learned about racism. The lesson continued through the 1950s
and 1960s, as the civil rights movement unfolded on tv. I saw the firehoses
and the dogs. And I felt: Racists are slimeballs. Even when I learned about
more subtle forms of racism, that feeling never left me.

I therefore find it hard to keep listening to some in the UUA leadership
when they solemnly assure me that, as a white, I can’t help but be some
kind of racist. The term “racist,” no matter how prefixed with modifiers
(like “institutional”), still feels like an insult. It’s as if they’re
telling me, “Richard, we have a more advanced understanding of what it
means to be a slimeball, and we’ve concluded that, in this more advanced
sense, you, Richard, are a slimeball.”

But there was more to that conversation with my parents back in 1950.
If there might be Negroes in school, I asked, where did they live? Why
had I never seen any? My father said, “They stick with their own kind.”
That meant, of course, that we whites were also a kind, and that we stuck
with our kind, too—though that was never said. (One of the rules of being
white is that you never talk about it, except by indirection.) My father
was teaching me about racial boundaries, and that it was important to respect
them. I was being racialized.

My racialization has handicapped me all my life. Fifty years later,
it still affects me. Whenever I’m getting to know a person of another race,
for instance, I notice an extra awkwardness. I feel a conflict within me—between
what I learned at age four (racial categories are important) and what I
believe now (racial categories are meaningless).
If the UUA leadership would like to help me, they can stop calling
me a rarefied racist and advise me instead on how to deal with my racialization.
(How can I minimize its effects? How can I avoid transmitting it to younger
people?) That, it seems to me, would also promote the UUA’s announced goal
of “dismantling racism.”

Racialization is the more fundamental evil, in that it makes racism
possible. Eliminate racialization, and racism, in all its forms, will evaporate.

The Rev. Richard Trudeau is minister of the UU Church of Weymouth,
Massachusetts. Since 1970 he has taught mathematics and the history of
astronomy at Stonehill College.

Moses and the UUABy Frank Rivas

As a child, I heard the story of Moses’ ascent to the holy mountain,
the place where he stood in the presence of God. I was surprised to learn
that meanwhile his people were so impatient that they began to worship
golden calves. Golden calves! What kind of people worship golden calves?
This story did not increase my esteem for grown-ups.

Now an adult, I begin to understand. I, too, have grown impatient.Too
often I’ve been willing to cast idols in metal.

I’m heartened that our denomination confronts the reality of racism
at a time when many are fatigued by an issue that just doesn’t seem to
go away. But I’m also grateful that our tradition doesn’t make an idol
of any one particular way of thinking about this problem but remains ever
open to new understandings. One of the strengths of liberal religion is
our willingness to challenge our own priorities and programs. I interpreted
in this spirit Thandeka’s 1999 General Assembly workshop titled Why Antiracism
Will Fail, which critiqued the UUA antiracism program.

Moses wanted to share what he had encountered in his 40 days and nights
on Mt. Sinai, but his words just weren’t adequate. The best he could come
up with was two tablets on which he described a life of gratitude and justice.
That summary, largely negative in tone, didn’t really get at what he had
experienced. Later prophets who sat on other mountaintops offered words
that broadened and deepened Moses’ description, but those words, too, fell
short. What matters most in life resists being clearly framed in anyone’s
words, anyone’s model, anyone’s institution.

Race is still an issue decades after civil rights legislation. No, the
playing field has not been leveled. An ethical issue that was once painfully
clear has become more nuanced, more complex, touching on a broader spectrum
of ethnic identities, confused with class and economic issues, reaching
beyond equality under the law. Addressing race requires the free and unfettered
speech of all who care about justice—and the critical dialogue that will
push each of us beyond our own narrow vision. Unless we understand the
depth and breadth of the problem, our fixes will be partial, and the fix—action—is
what it’s all about. Like Moses, who reached beyond understanding to confront
the pharaoh and to lead his people to the promised land, we must act and
reflect, act and reflect: acting from partial understanding, reflecting
on our action, adjusting our action to our broader understanding, then
reflecting again. To act without ongoing reflection or to reflect and diagnose
without committing ourselves to the work of justice is not living in good
faith.

Like Moses, Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the mountaintop. Like Moses,
he knew he might not get to the Promised Land with us but that we as a
people will get there. We will not get there as a people who seek guidance
for every step in the revelations of the past but as a people open to ongoing
revelation.

The affirmation of ongoing revelation, revelation to which each voice
contributes, is why I signed on to liberal religion. And working for an
end to racism, classism, economic injustice is far too important to leave
to any single understanding. It requires everyone’s wisdom, everyone’s
commitment, everyone’s love.
If we do it right, we may yet redeem the reputation of grown-ups.

The Rev. Frank Rivas is parish minister of First Universalist Church
in Minneapolis, which has a long tradition of social justice ministry in
the Twin Cities.

When the Zapatista rebels first struck in Chiapas, on January 1, 1994,
I was not surprised at all, for I had witnessed how badly the Indians there
were treated by the mestizos and whites. I was a 9-year-old boy when my
father was called to be the Presbyterian minister in Villa de las Margaritas,
in the northern region of Chiapas. In that little village, people greeted
all passersby politely, even strangers—that is, if the passersby were white
or mestizo. I saw many of those friendly people crossing to the other side
of the street in order to avoid greeting an Indian. The region’s Indians,
mostly Tojolabal, came to town once or twice a year on colorful religious
pilgrimages, dancing and playing flutes and drums. They also came to town
to sell their agricultural products or to buy at the stores. Each time,
they were treated with disdain by almost everyone whose path they crossed.
I had first learned about the Indians just before coming to Chiapas.As
a seminarian, my father wrote his dissertation on the impact of the Christian
gospel on the indigenous peoples of Chiapas. This took him to the mountains
of the state, home of the Tzeltal and Chol Indians. When he got home, he
brought back many pictures and cherished memories of the time he had spent
there. He taught me that the Indians were intelligent, clean, hard-working,
and above all loving people who deserved respect. But everything I saw
around me in Chiapas contradicted that concept of having respect for the
Indians. More generally, in Mexico to this day, the word indio is used
as an insult among mestizos and whites.Institutionalized racism is blatant
and permeates all social and economic strata, as well as institutions like
politics, religion, and the media. To see this, all you need to do is watch
a Mexican soap opera on tv. Though 95 percent of Mexicans are mestizos
with Indian blood, the actors on these shows look so European that a Canadian
friend of mine says they remind him of tv in Scandinavia. As a light-skinned
mestizo, I was among the winners, enjoying many social privileges that
I took for granted and believed I deserved. I used them whenever I could,
and just like many others I made fun of Indians.

Then I came to live in the United States. My world of privilege collapsed.
Here, I am the Mexican immigrant who speaks with a foreign accent and belongs
to a sub-world where people make comments about my “wetback” brothers and
sisters as if I am not there. A sub-world where other Latin American immigrants
get offended when asked if they’re Mexican. I no longer feel I’m automatically
welcome; in fact, I represent the persona non grata.I have to struggle
to prove that I don’t fit the stereotype of the Mexican: lazy, ignorant,
and drunk, sitting under a cactus, wearing a hat that covers his face—and
his shame.

This is not because of the accent per se, because my French and Austrian
friends have it a lot easier socially in spite of their heavy accents.
It is the Indian blood in me, of which I now am proud.

When I first arrived in the United States, I couldn’t understand why
so many Mexican Americans preferred not to speak Spanish, or why they had
forgotten how to speak it, even though their parents and grandparents speak
only Spanish at home. Now I have figured it out: the dominant culture has
stripped them of their ethnic cultural pride.

Ervin Barrios, a Spanish-English translator, is events coordinator
for the Latina/o Unitarian Universalist Networking Association (LUUNA)
and a member of the GA Planning Committee and First Unitarian Church of
San Jose, California. He is also the producer of the Proyecto 2000
Spanish-language television series.

Race or Class? Race and Class?By Tracey Robinson-Harris

Race? In a word, white. Scots Irish and a bit of German and English—to
be as precise as I can. My ancestors, farmers and laborers, settled in
the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Like hundreds of other
Scots Irish—Scottish settlers in Northern Ireland—they had had their land
stolen and came here in hopes of rebuilding their lives.

Class? No one-word answer here. My mother was born on a farm in Amherst
County, Virginia, to a family of tobacco sharecroppers. In the early 1940s,
my maternal grandmother left her husband (an older man with children her
age) and, with her three teenage children, came to the “city” (actually
small town) of Lynchburg, Virginia, to make a better life. She got work
as a dining room supervisor at a women’s college.

My father grew up in a part of Lynchburg that was also home to many
African American families, the all-black high school, and the Phillis Wheatley
YWCA. His first job after the army was in a horse-rendering plant—for one
day! After work as a lineman for the local power company, he got a civil
service job working on a mail train. My mother stayed home after I was
born, never returning to her secretarial job. When mail trains were discontinued,
my father worked night shift at a post office and then had a rural mail
route. By the time I was in third grade, we had a brand new house in a
brand new suburb with its own elementary school, and I got to pick the
color of the paint for my bedroom.

Poor to working class to middle class in two generations. And white.
And I wonder, from time to time, just how the hell I got here. How did
a woman just one generation out of the tobacco fields of central Virginia
get to be a UU and a minister, to preach from pulpits where the likes of
William Ellery Channing once preached?

After 30 years as a Unitarian Universalist, I still struggle with that
question and, from time to time, with feeling like a fraud, like someone
who doesn’t really belong. Having learned the ways of the middle and upper-middle
classes, I can, with some skill, engage in “class-passing.”

When my parents visit churches I have served, they adopt the formal
behavior that comes with feeling out of place. They speak to folks in the
congregation who greet them in the language of smiles, and “ma’am” and
“sir.”

Meanwhile, I call this place, in which they will always be visitors,
home. I’m a true measure of their success. The Protestant work ethic fulfilled.
Anyone can make it. You can be whatever you want to be. Study hard. Get
good grades. Win scholarships. Be one of those in whom teachers see “something,”
one of those to whom they offer extra encouragement. Never give up. My
parents’ hard work gave me access to this good life that I critique. As
I write I have this knot in my stomach. Should they read this, would they
feel they have failed me?

We Unitarian Universalists speak about our collective class identity
as middle/upper-middle class. While the data we have about ourselves indicate
that collectively the label fits, I cannot help but wonder how many of
us are, like me, middle or upper-middle class by one generation? How many
are one paycheck away from falling out of the middle class? How much of
our UU class identity is about history and heritage—who we were—and how
much about who we have become? I wonder how complicated the “class identity”
of our faith community is these days?
And I have to wonder—how much does race have to do with my being Unitarian
Universalist? Over the course of my journey to this religious community,
and in spite of sexism, how many doors opened for me because I’m “white”?
I never thought of myself as privileged because of my whiteness (being
white was just “normal”) until a decade or so ago. As I think back on my
own past, it’s hard to reconstruct precisely where and how privilege made
a difference, even though I now know where privileges existed for white
folks like me in the South of the 1950s and 1960s—in education, employment,
and the economics of both. How much of what I accomplished resulted from
my own intelligence, persistence, hard work? And how much comes from the
social construct of race that privileges “whiteness” and my access to that
collective identity called white? Finally, in what ways is my journey within
Unitarian Universalism about access to “whiteness”—or more accurately,
to more privileges of whiteness than I might otherwise have been able to
know because of class or gender?

I have only been a white woman for a decade or so. Before that, I was
a simply a woman, and one for whom gender was the defining category of
oppression. Then I started trying to figure out what it means to be white
and what I am called to do when my hard-won, yet incomplete, justice as
a woman comes face to face with another’s experience of injustice. What
am I to do at the intersection of gender and race? Or race and class? The
relationship between race and class is as complicated as the race and gender
one, albeit with a different texture and pain.

I worry over the tender, sore places in our religious community where
personal commitments to overcoming oppression are so identified with one
of its defining categories, or when by resistance to or denial of other
categories, we can’t seem to find a way to move toward justice. I worry
we will get stuck arguing over where to start, what comes first, which
is more important. I worry that useless hierarchies and false choices will
divert us. I worry that the interlocked oppressions of racism, classism,
heterosexism, ableism, sexism, and the rest will simply carry on while
we disagree, deny, and those of us who are white defend our precious privileges.

As Audre Lorde once wrote, the fight for justice takes all of our selves
working together, and the struggle against any form of injustice generates
energies useful in our struggles against other forms.

The Rev. Tracey Robinson-Harris belongs to Arlington Street Church
in Boston, where she preached the sermon from which this article was developed.
A minister of religious education, she has served on the UUA staff since
1995.

The Cultures of ReligionBy Mark Morrison-Reed

The congregations lining West St. Clair Avenue in affluent Forest Hill—the
imposing Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, Deer Park United, Holy Rosary,
and even First Unitarian of Toronto—all represent mainline Canada. But
when I travel south or west from Christie and Davenport, the corner nearest
my house, the neighborhood looks different. Heading west from home, I see
the Metropolitan Korean Presbyterian Church, then the domed spire of St.
Nektarioc Greek Orthodox Church, and further along, St. Paul’s Slovak Evangelical
Lutheran. Going south, I pass a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall with Portuguese
language services, then East Toronto Presbyterian Korean Church, and two
blocks later, Korean Beacon Church.

Institutional religion is always a marriage of religion with culture.
Take the Transylvanian Unitarian congregations in Romania. They don’t care
to embrace diversity, endeavoring instead to preserve the Hungarian culture
within a Romanian-dominated society. Or take the Metropolitan Community
Church, an adaptation of Christianity to gay culture.

We like to think otherwise about ourselves, but our UU faith communities
are also as much a product of our culture as of our religious perspective.
UU norms—our style of worship, principles, attitudes, and social concerns—are
shaped by our upper-middle-class, North American values. We don’t see how
strongly these influence us because we live inside that particular cultural
box.

This points to a problem. In continental surveys, many UUs express a
desire to embrace diversity and are frustrated by the slow pace of diversification.
But is it really diversity we desire? And do we want it even if it means
cultural upheaval? Or do we actually want to attract people of diverse
ethnicity only if they fit into our culture—a culture we don’t even recognize
as one?

The temptation is to lie to ourselves. In 1967 the UUA Report of the
Committee on Goals found that in regard to “Negro” ministers 27 percent
of UUs agreed that such a person’s “race might hamper his effectiveness,”
while 47 percent said the same thing of women ministers and their gender.
What then transpired calls our survey results into question. The number
of women in our ministry grew from a handful in that year to 199 in 1987,
and 431 out of the 853 in active ministry today. Meanwhile, the number
of ministers of color, which in 1967 was nearly identical to the number
of women, increased to 17 in 1987. It currently stands at 45, at least
seven of whom are not in active ministry or haven’t been involved in the
UUA in a decade or more. Now compare the number of ministers of color to
the number of openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender ministers,
which stands at approximately 5 percent. Similar, but take note: the first
openly gay minister was granted fellowship less that 25 years ago. The
first minister of color, the Rev. Joseph Jordan, was licensed by the Universalists
in 1888 and ordained in 1889.

We’ve chosen a path, and these numbers tell us which. Culture has prevailed.
Diversity advances more quickly when the primary barrier to inclusivity
is not culture but gender or sexual orientation. The people of color who
have become UUs are those who already operate within our cultural norms.
Examine the résumés of UU ministers, and it’s often hard
to tell who is of color and who not.

There are good reasons for us to become more inclusive—the survival
and revitalization of Unitarian Universalism being foremost. But let’s
not fool ourselves about what such a change entails, for to misjudge what
is possible is to set ourselves up for frustration and failure.

The Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed is cominister of the First Unitarian
Congregation of Toronto, Ontario.